Or don’t bother coming back into this family.
“Did you send this?” she asked.
Vanessa stared at me instead of answering.
“She has always hated me,” she said.
“She came into that house looking for a fight.
She wants to ruin me.”
I could barely hear her over the memory of the doctor’s words.
Ruby was going to lose vision in her left eye.
The injury was permanent.
The surgery might repair the bones around her eye and protect what remained, but it could not restore what Vanessa had taken in one burst of rage.
A nurse appeared at the doorway and asked to speak with me.
I stood at once.
Behind me, my mother said my name in a pleading voice.
I did not turn around.
The nurse led me back through the double doors.
Ruby lay beneath a white blanket, surrounded by machines that blinked and breathed in steady rhythms.
One side of her face was swollen and bandaged.
Her hand looked impossibly small against the hospital sheet.
I sat beside her and took her fingers in mine.
Her eye remained closed, but she stirred when I spoke.
“Mommy’s here.”
Her lips moved.
I leaned closer.
“Am I in trouble?” she whispered.
The question broke something in me more completely than the doctor’s diagnosis had.
“No,” I said.
“You did nothing wrong.”
“Aunt Vanessa said I stole.”
“Grandma told you that you could have the cake.”
Ruby was quiet for several seconds.
Then she asked, “Why didn’t Grandma help me?”
There was no answer a six-year-old should ever have to understand.
I smoothed her hair away from the bandage.
“You are safe now,” I told her.
